Design for Health
My fourth Industrial Design core class was centred around design for health. Our class partnered with a local transitionary elementary school, Beverly Public School, in order to gain first-hand research into problems that some of that faced the children. A large portion of the time for this project was spent observing and note-taking on-site at Beverly school. I observed behaviours, tendencies, habits, problems and stress-points. After all the initial research I synthesized my findings into root-problems, and began brainstorming meaningful solutions to some of the more pressing issues. This project went through countless iterations as each idea and prototype was field-tested at the Beverly school with the children to work out any oversights I might have made. This kind of immediate feedback was crucial in order to create a meaningful solution to a problem which ultimately led to a much more polished idea. The problem I identified was a few children that would throw objects across the room, potentially hurting other students or the teachers. My solution used a visual action/reaction function to help alleviate and encourage children to replace the object where it came from. This took form in a rubberized placemat with some simple internal electronics, that would light up if the object was on the mat. If the object was removed the light would go off, and vice versa. This immediate visual reaction was crucial to the validity of the product. I go into full detail about my design process and the final product below in the attached slideshow. I also made a quick video demonstrating the placemat in use.
